Buying Clear

I've rented maybe a hundred movies from iTunes by now, but until this past week, I hadn't bought a single one.

What changed that? The right price, I guess.

Remember this post from a year ago -- exactly a year ago, to the day -- in which I bemoaned the high cost of adding Tim's Vermeer and Jodorowsky's Dune to my 2014 viewings in time for my deadline? (Still haven't seen either movie, by the way.) As they were not available for rent, I'd have to pay at least $15.99 to own them if I wanted to see them in time.

Well the same won't be said for Alex Gibney's Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, which I must see as some kind of burden because I've put off watching it about as long as I could while still getting to count it for 2015. Oh, like the two movies above, it isn't available to rent either. But its purchase price was a mere $5.99 -- or a dollar less than what I paid to rent the disappointing I Smile Back.

So while I am still philosophically opposed to buying a movie I haven't seen, since there's not a great likelihood I will want to watch it again (especially with a documentary), at least now the simple math made this one too much of a no-brainer. My conscience is clear -- so to speak.

I can't quite figure out the logic behind pricing Going Clear at $5.99 to own, when you might theoretically make a greater return on renting it for $4.99. Then again, if a person is only going to watch the movie one time, does it really matter whether you rent it to that person or sell it to that person? I have no idea if it is intrinsically more expensive for a movie to be downloaded for purchase than downloaded for rental, but I wouldn't think it would be. The price seems to be set at what the value to the purchaser might be, and if that person has no expected desire to see the movie multiple times, he/she is not going to pay $15.99 or more to own it.

If only iTunes had realized this a year ago.

The other nice thing about owning Going Clear is that when we do get around to watching it, we won't be required to finish it within 24 hours before it expires.

Which could be really helpful in the final six days of my 2015 viewing season, when every viewing is catch as catch can.

However, do you know how this story ends? Take a guess.

When I belatedly reviewed our other two, Australian-based streaming services last night to see what 2015 releases might be available through them, I found Going Clear on Presto. For free.

Can you sell iTunes movies on eBay?

A late western surge

Either because of a conspiracy of release dates or the prioritizing of my own viewings, I'm finishing my 2015 viewing season with no fewer than four westerns in the final eight days.

All I'd have to do is schedule a viewing of The Ridiculous 6 on Netflix and I'd have a full house.

And without revealing exactly how much I've liked the two movies I've seen so far, let's just say we're off to a good start.

It was a double feature yesterday, as my wife being able to pick up the kids from daycare allowed me to watch Slow West on my laptop at a Starbucks, in anticipation of meeting up with a friend for an 8:40 showing of The Revenant. (The Revenant was playing only two blocks away from where I work, so it seemed silly to go home and get the kids only to return to that exact location two hours later, and fortunately, it worked out for my wife to help me avoid that.)

The second two will be a Kurt Russell double feature. I already know I'm committed to a Bone Tomahawk screening, since I've rented it from iTunes, and that viewing figures to transpire on Saturday night. Then the big news of the last few days: I've found a way to see The Hateful Eight in time for my ranking deadline. Only just. It doesn't open wide here until January 21st, but the road show version (the one I want to see anyway) opens a week earlier than that at exactly one cinema, and if I hadn't been driving exactly where I was driving with my kids on Tuesday, I wouldn't have seen the poster that informed me of that fact. I've already got tickets for a 10 a.m. screening next Thursday, which was scheduled as a day off for me anyway. That will be just 14 hours before the Oscar noms are announced, officially ending my ranking year.

Westerns are not my favorite genre, to say the least. That could explain me dragging my feet on getting to Slow West in particular. However, I'm starting to wonder if 2015 will make up some ground in changing my mind on that topic, and not even necessarily because of a film that came out in 2015. Early on in the year I saw (and was blown away by) Sergio Leone's 1968 film Once Upon a Time in the West, which immediately installed itself among my favorite westerns of all time. I've also got one western (Unforgiven) in my top 20 of all time. So maybe I just need the right kind of westerns, and maybe 2015 is finally introducing me to those.

How will Bone Tomahawk and The Hateful Eight stack up? And for that matter, how much do I like Slow West and The Revenant?

You have only a week more to wait to find out.

Boycott lifted

I've made exactly two boycotts that I can think of in the seven years of this blog's existence. One was explicit, in an actual post called "Boycott," which greeted the arrival of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. The other one was kind of understood, the result of me attacking the minions at regular intervals and swearing never to intentionally expose my children to one of their movies. One of those posts -- this one -- has become kind of my breakout post, visited and commented on by far more people than I could have ever imagined, and taking on sort of a life of its own. (That's 23 comments and 15692 page views.) I would almost call it my 15 minutes of blogger fame.

As of this week, one of those two boycotts has been lifted.

That's right, not only have I seen Minions, but so has my son.

The change came about as a result of two unrelated circumstances. One was that when we were on vacation in Tasmania last month, my wife saw a hand-knitted minion winter cap at a market in a small town. It being only $5 -- an exceptional price for a hand-made garment, even if it it's a minion garment -- she decided to buy it. This was weird for two reasons: 1) It won't be winter hat season here until about June, and 2) My son already has a minion winter hat that we bought for him in the U.S., as discussed in this post. It's not as nice as this one, but it makes this a duplicate in two ways -- not only is it another winter hat, it's another minion winter hat.

The second circumstance was that I learned a few days ago that I'd be watching my son on Tuesday. I usually watch my younger son, the one who just turned two, on Tuesdays, but usually the five-year-old goes to school that day. This being summer, though, the schedule is all out of whack, and I had both of them on Tuesday. That made it slightly more necessary for me to find something to do during the younger one's nap, especially since I'd also have both of them on Wednesday. And it being the time of year when I'm cramming 2015 movies, and Minions being a 2015 movie, and it containing almost no potential for scaring him ...

There was a third, less important reason, which is that I've been subtly made to feel like a bit of a Grinch for denying my son access to the minions. My wife doesn't like them (much) either, but whenever I'd make a comment along the lines of "He's not watching that movie with me," she'd give me a look of humorous sadness -- like she got it, but she still thought it was a bit of an ogre move to deny him something he would so obviously love.

So this week, I wondered: Is it time to let the minions into my heart?

So I rented the movie on Monday and we popped it in to the BluRay player on Tuesday, about 20 minutes after the younger one went down for his nap.

Conclusion: I still don't like the minions.

I was actually with this movie for a while. I enjoyed the origins scenes, the ones that show these apparently immortal creatures moving from master to master, all the way back to the age of the dinosaurs. It was implausible to say the least, but carried off with enough panache to be watchable. And yes, I found myself laughing from time to time. I was even into it up until the movie's present day, which is 1968, when they connect up with the awesomely named villain Scarlett Overkill, voiced by Sandra Bullock. (My love of Bullock also probably helped knock down some walls between me and Minions.) I dug her act and that of her husband, Herb (Jon Hamm). I thought it was clever enough that the minions meet her at an event called VillainCon. It's all working well enough at this point.

Then the minion called Bob becomes the king of England, and, well, back to the status quo.

From this point on, the movie just annoyed me. Everything I had found moderately tolerable about the minions in the first half of the movie turned to moderately intolerable. And that's where my star rating ended up for the movie: 2.5 stars.

I guess that's a victory of sorts for the little yellow blobs, as I would have predicted something in the one- to 1.5-star range for a movie devoted entirely to them. I liked it better than The Good Dinosaur, anyway.

One thing that was especially strange, and also heartening, was that my son didn't really like it. I wish it were for a better reason, though. "It's banal, father," he didn't say. "These yellow sprites and their cartoonish antics are just not for me," he also didn't say. What he did say was, "It was too scary." In fact, at the hour mark he almost made me turn it off. Why? Because the minions were dangling from a chandelier that was about to fall. I didn't realize a fear of heights could be vicariously transferred to what's happening to characters in a movie -- I thought you're only supposed to be afraid of monsters and stuff, the kind of thing that can invade your dreams later on. But my wife later confirmed that she, who also has a fear of heights, has felt vicarious fear for characters in movies who were dangling from great heights. (A fact we may test if we watch The Walk this weekend.)

So is the boycott back on? It's too early for me to say. The fact that Minions made more than a billion dollars at the global box office means that anywhere from three to 14 more Minions movies will be made, even though the first one unintentionally boxed itself in by bringing us up to the moment when they take up with Gru, their master in Despicable Me and Despicable Me 2 (the second of which I still haven't seen). As is always the case, any part of the narrative continuity of these creatures can be dismantled or rebooted if it means more money in the studio's coffers.

So no, I'm not really inclined to see Minions 2, which surprisingly has not been given a release date yet, as far as IMDB knows anything about it.

Then again, if it's January of 2018 and I find myself stuck at home on a summer day with my sons, both of whom will be old enough to watch it at that point ... you never know.

Assuming, that is, there are no chandeliers in it.

The year movies were named like hurricanes

Have you noticed how many 2015 movies have just a woman's first name as their title?

Joy became the fifth on my list for this year, and there are two more prominent ones I'm planning to see over the next ten days. And Joy isn't even the only one starring Jennifer Lawrence. (Nor is it the only 2015 movie with a prominent character named Joy, thanks to Inside Out.)

Forthwith, we'll look at the candidates and their worthiness of being named after the main character, starting with ...

Joy
Directed by: David O. Russell
Worthiness of being named after the main character: High
Thoughts: Joy has a lot going on, to put it mildly, but it does mostly focus on this one character and her mop-inventing aspirations. It's also, I suppose, about her search for happiness, so yeah, she joins a storied cinematic tradition of characters with names that also function as intangible nouns. (If I see another movie character named Grace, I may have to kill myself -- and lookee here, there's a movie called Looking for Grace that came out two months ago.)

Serena
Directed by: Susanne Bier
Worthiness of being named after the main character: Moderate
Thoughts: The other film starring Jennifer Lawrence actually bears a 2014 release year in IMDB, but didn't get released theatrically in the U.S. until February, and I'm firmly counting it with my 2015 movies. Like Joy, this also co-stars Bradley Cooper (we just can't separate these two -- they've been in at least four movies together, three of them directed by David O. Russell). It's about a Depression era North Carolina timber baron who marries a headstrong woman named Serena. However, it does not seem very essential that the movie was named after her, even if his fortunes do turn on his relationship with the character.

Cinderella
Directed by: Kenneth Branagh
Worthiness of being named after the main character: High
Thoughts: I mean, it's the name of the story. Who are we to argue with that? However, as discussed in this post, I would have liked the movie better if the character had actually felt like the center of her own story, and not just a bystander letting fate buffet her around like a sailboat on a stormy ocean.

Maggie
Directed by: Henry Hobson
Worthiness of being named after the main character: High
Thoughts: Wake up, Maggie, I think I've got something to say to you. You've been bitten by a zombie, and I don't think you're ever going BACK to school. Indeed, this is the story of Arnold Schwarzenegger's emotional struggle to save his daughter from the inevitable: death at the hands of a zombie bite. Her name is Maggie. Seems like as good a reason as any to choose this as the name of the movie -- it works a bit in the same capacity as We Need to Talk About Kevin, because yeah, when you've got a bitten daughter, you do need to talk about that shit.

Victoria
Directed by: Sebastian Schipper
Worthiness of being named after the main character: High
Thoughts: As the single character who is basically on the screen for the entire length of this daring single-take movie -- "basically," because during one scene where she could afford to get away for a moment, she supposedly excused herself to answer a desperate need to use the bathroom -- Laia Costa's Victoria does earn having a movie named after her. She's the sole constant in this two-plus hours of one late night in Berlin that goes from banal to crazy, in a believable if sometimes tedious fashion.

And the ones I haven't yet seen, and can only truly speculate about ...

Amy
Directed by: Asif Kapadia
Worthiness of being named after the main character: Moderate to high
Thoughts: I understand this to be a stripped-bare look into Amy Winehouse's life, and the title certainly works to convey that type of intimacy. My question is, is the single name Amy distinctive enough to indicate that the movie is about Amy Winehouse without any other knowledge of the film? I'd say no. Not like the future documentaries Beyonce and Rihanna will be, anyway.

Carol
Directed by: Todd Haynes
Worthiness of being named after the main character: Dubious
Thoughts: I say "dubious" only because I know this is a two-hander, meaning it is mostly about the two characters with (as I understand it) somewhat minimal acting contributions from others. If that's the case, naming the movie after only one of them seems to throw off the apparent balance. But I look forward to finding out for myself when this becomes one of the final films I watch before closing off my 2015 list next Thursday.

Other movies I've seen that would have fit well in 2015:

Amelie
Chloe
Coraline
Diana
Domino
Elizabeth
Emma
Evita
Frida
Gigi
Grace
Guinevere
Hanna
Ida 
Juno
Lucy 
Mallory
Margaret
Maryam
Miral
Mulan
Nell
Nena
Oleanna
Paprika
Selena
Tammy
Tess
Woo

That's only 29 other titles among all the 4,400+ movies I've ever seen. Makes the seven titles I will see in 2015 seem even more like a conglomeration.

A trend! I've identified it!

The bad dental advice of children's movies

It's bad enough that my five-year-old is regressing to his infancy in the month remaining before he starts school. He doesn't need any help from the entertainment that's geared toward him.

Regressing? Try a series of "accidents" that he had stopped having a full year ago, maybe longer. We've still got a few weeks to sort this out, but suffice it to say I'm concerned.

However, it's just poor hygiene that the TV shows and movies aimed at him are advocating.

Goosebumps isn't out here yet -- a strange fate for a Halloween movie, which will finally be rectified next Thursday -- but we've seen the trailer before just about every movie we've watched recently. I'm pretty sure that's three times, though to be honest, I can only think of two movies we would have seen during the time period they would have logically been showing Goosebumps trailers: Hotel Transylvania 2 (another Halloween movie) and The Good Dinosaur this past Sunday.

Anyway, the trailer has made quite an impression on my son, as it walks that line between attracting him and repelling him. He is of course drawn in by the images, but he's also scared of them. It's a tightrope act children his age must constantly walk.

The moment from the trailer he mentioned of his own accord yesterday, though, was a humorous one, when that kid jumps on the werewolf unleashed from one of R.L. Stine's books and bites him on the neck. It has the desired effect of driving off the monster because the kid has silver fillings. When the girl he has a crush on asks for an explanation, he admits it was because of the whole year he went without brushing his teeth.

Every parent in the audience cringes when he or she hears a thing like that. And then when your kid brings it up again on his own ... well, it looks like we may need to go back to monitoring our son's brushing more closely, like we did before we trusted him.

As luck would have it, this is also the time that we're trying to teach him the right routine for washing up after using the bathroom. (When he remembers to get to the bathroom in time, that is -- which, to be fair, is still most of the time.) He also watches a show on Australian TV called Lah Lah's Big Love Band, which features a perky female singer who waltzes through an animated playhouse with her equally perky male bandmates for about three songs per episode. One of those songs contains the lyrics

I like to wash my hands and wipe 'em on my pants
I like to wash my hands and wipe 'em on my pants
I like to wash my hands and wipe 'em on my pants
And that's the way I like to do it

Since he first heard that song, we haven't gotten him to use a towel once.

What are the writers of these movies and TV shows thinking? In the case of Goosebumps, they're probably thinking "Don't take your kids to see Goosebumps if they haven't mastered brushing their teeth yet." (And then I'm thinking, in response, "Okay, don't show the Goosebumps trailer before movies my brushing challenged son might see!") In terms of Lah Lah's Big Love Band, though, that is absolutely, definitely a show aimed at kids who are five or even younger. I guess it's never too early to try to tap into a viewer's sense of dormant rebellion.

At least there isn't a song that goes

I like to poop my pants although I'm starting school
I like to poop my pants although I'm starting school
I like to poop my pants although I'm starting school
And my parents don't know what the hell to do about it

Revisionist backlash

What better movie to watch on New Year's Day than one where the clock striking midnight figures prominently into the plot?

Actually, that had no bearing on my decision to rent Cinderella along with Spy when I ran out on New Year's Eve to restock our refrigerator. Neither did the fact that we could watch it with my older son while the younger one was napping, making it a two-birds-with-one-stone affair -- though he ultimately tuned out after about 45 minutes. The real motivations were that a) I could keep the movies for an extra night because of the holiday, and b) I'd been pressing my wife to see it for about a month now, because I'd heard everyone talk about how good it was.

After seeing it, my only conclusion about the strength of the praise is that it's revisionist backlash.

Oh, this is an okay movie. More than okay, maybe. But John Waters' second favorite movie of the year? What?

It seems like people are sick of seeing Disney make its movies overly politically correct, and are happy just to see revisionism kicked to the curb for a change. And Waters has certainly never been a fan of political correctness.

To be sure, I'd heard that this was an old-fashioned, straightforward telling of this familiar fairy tale. However, I didn't expect it to be quite so ... boring. Apparently, this is what people liked about it.

Disney's recent movies have tended to be ... not so boring. Or at least, not so straightforward in their approach to the storytelling. Hits like the much-discussed Tangled and the uber-phenomenon Frozen both show Disney bending over backwards to make sure that the female characters have their own agency, that they do as much prince-saving as being saved by princes, and ultimately that they don't need no man. While those movies are not outright revisionism, you can find an example of outright revisionism only last year, when Disney told Sleeping Beauty from the perspective of its villain, Maleficent. And despite some flaws in the presentation, Maleficent the movie ultimately did some interesting things with its choice to view the title character sympathetically, to make her the victim of male hatred. (At the very least, it was giving us mature stuff that probably went over the heads of its youngest viewers.)

Cinderella is not like that at all. Cinderella is straighter than an arrow. It gives us pretty much exactly the story as we're accustomed to hearing it. Except for the fact that Kenneth Branagh's 2015 version is 27 minutes longer than the 1950 animated version, I would not even be surprised to hear that the story beats are apportioned out at exactly the same time intervals over the course of the narrative.

And this movie was a hit, especially relative to Maleficent, which had a much more tepid critical response (Cinderella's 67 on Metacritic puts it firmly in the green of "generally favorable reviews," while Maleficent's 56 leaves it in the murky orange of "mixed or average reviews").

So is this the artistic equivalent of a politician "getting back to straight talk?" Are audiences so frustrated with all this "liberal mumbo jumbo" that they just want someone who "tells it like it is?" And does "telling it like it is" entail female characters who, while not lacking entirely in agency, are happy enough just to be demure?

Another benefit I noted to the approaches of these other movies, particularly Tangled -- they're a lot more fun. A piece of wisdom I gleaned about Cinderella while seeing it through my son's eyes is just how damn sad the story is. First Ella's mother dies, which I had to explain to him and see how it impacted him. Then after another five minutes or so, her father dies, as another separate, elongated episode. Frozen at least had the decency to kill off both parents in one quick scene, showing nothing more than a ship sinking in the distance. Then of course Ella is subjected to a series of indignities at the hands of her wicked stepsisters and stepmother. By 30 minutes in you wonder if anything happy will ever happen in this movie, and that was about the time when my son said "Daddy, you know I don't like movies where things that happen are sad."

It caused me to think about Tangled, where no characters actually die until the very end, and then it's just the bad guy. That story gets its melancholy from a girl being kidnapped and her parents thinking she's dead, but the whole time we know she's alive and (basically) well inside a tower. Sure, that's kind of the exception as most Disney movies feature at least one dead parent, though usually only one. But the way Cinderella drags these things out and forces kids to focus on them is just kind of perverse.

I said my son checked out around 45 minutes, which was especially interesting because that's just when the magical stuff started to really happen -- the pumpkin turning into a carriage and whatnot. Well, when he came back to the movie later, it was when the prince's father this time was in bed, dying. So if you're keeping track at home, that's three dead parents of characters we like. No wonder my son quickly checked out again.

If your revisionism makes for a more fun movie and also gives the women a little bit of additional responsibility for the outcome of their own lives, by all means, revise these stories all you want.

And go sell your straight talk to somebody else.

I Spy with my little eye ...

New Year's last year entailed viewings of I, Frankenstein and I Origins, which both ended up being among the worst movies I saw in 2014.

Ending 2015 with I Spy was much better.

Okay, not actually I Spy -- that was a 2002 movie starring Eddie Murphy and Owen Wilson. It was just Spy, Paul Feig's Melissa McCarthy vehicle which I'd already seen and knew I loved. My wife hadn't yet seen it, though, which made it the perfect way to close out a New Year's Eve in which we didn't even land at the airport until after 6 p.m., and didn't have our kids in bed until more than two hours later. At that point, some laughter was really needed.

(And now you know why I haven't posted any of my typical year-end thought pieces: We were in Tasmania visiting my mother-in-law from the 26th onward, and I'd left my new computer back home. Oh yeah -- did I mention that my hard drive did actually die, which I forecasted in this post?)

Why was laughter so direly needed? Well, we returned home to discover that our power was off. It wasn't a power outage, mind you. It was just our power.

We can't say it was entirely a surprise. Our power had gone out earlier in the week of Christmas, and we'd needed an electrician to come out and set things straight. He blamed a slug in a wall outlet, which seems a bit farfetched, but we were willing to accept any explanation at that point. Really, it's just that our electricity in this house is faulty, a fact you can blame either on it being an old house or on the person who did the renovations cutting corners for budgetary reasons. Anyway, we're only renting this place so there isn't a lot we can do about it.

The problem with the power going out when you're out of town for six days is that you have no idea how long it's been out, and how tainted the food in your refrigerator is. Do you lose only the frozen foods and dairy products, or also your various sauces and other things that can last a little longer without a direct application of cold? By touching various things and finding them still mildly chilled -- on a day that approached 100 degrees in Melbourne, mind you -- we determined that it had probably only been that day that the safety had tripped. (And fortunately, the power did come back on just by resetting it, and has remained on for the 12 hours since then. Can you imagine having to summon an electrician on December 31st at 8 o'clock at night?) But we did have to dump a bunch of stuff, and I had to beat feet out to the grocery store to purchase some much-needed necessaries before a potential early New Year's Eve closure. Which was just as well, because I had to pick up Spy anyway -- and it meant I didn't have to corral two over-excited kids for their bedtime.

And even though chaos reigned in the first 90 minutes we were home, the kids gave us a New Year's miracle by both going to sleep without any trouble, and by about 9:15 we were settling in to Spy -- whose nearly two-hour running time would take us up to the stroke of midnight quite nicely, factoring in breaks, without anyone worrying about succumbing to pre-2016 exhaustion. 

And yes, we laughed quite a bit -- me for the second time, her for the first.

"I spy with my little eye" was actually relevant to our trip, as that was the game we played as we traveled the east coast of Tasmania with my wife's mother for the past week. Unbelievably, it was a game both my kids could play, even though the younger one just turns two today. It sounded more like "Ispymy" when he said it, but he delivered a setup and answer, just as the game would dictate -- though he didn't quite get that he was supposed to make us guess what he was spying. He just wanted to tell us what he spied. Which for a two-year-old is still quite good.

We had quite a nice time on the trip, staying in two different beach towns, going on a glass bottom boat, seeing an echidna crossing the road, spotting two different huntsman spiders within the space of about six hours (both inside the place were staying), going swimming at the beach on two different days (well, I swam at least, as the water was too cold for everyone else), eating lots of good food and admiring lots of natural wonders. It was a low-key time (in which I managed to watch only two movies!), but it was probably just what the doctor ordered after a very busy December.

Thoughts on the year just ended? Well, none right now, I guess. But don't worry. There will be plenty of that in the coming weeks, with my 2015 rankings a mere two weeks away now. 

Time to get back to reality ... and watching as many more 2015 releases as I can stand before then. 

Never too late to fall in love with Tangled

It's a milestone Tangled post for me -- the tenth time I have tagged a post as Tangled-related in the nearly seven-year history of this blog. (Only five of those years matter, though, because Tangled didn't exist until November of 2010.) But it's the first one in just over a year, so I'm hoping you don't feel totally Tangled out.

I've averaged a viewing of Tangled for every year of its existence, as Christmas brought my fifth Tangled viewing, though my first since August of 2013. (Tangled was actually the backup plan; we were supposed to watch The Book of Life, but for an iTunes downloading mishap.)

It was the fourth viewing for my wife, though you wouldn't know it. She remembered it as only her second viewing. I don't know how well it speaks of Tangled that she forgot two entire viewings of it, but she made up for that fact by finally loving it.

Oh, she liked Tangled when I insisted she go to the theater to watch it in 2010. Her primary complaint was that she thought Rapunzel didn't have enough agency in the final scene, as she thought Rapunzel should have made the sacrificial gesture, not Eugene. (Rapunzel tried to make it, but Eugene out-sacrificed her.) I knew she carried that complaint with her, so I was kind of surprised that she agreed to a second viewing when I bought the BluRay the next spring (April 16th, to be exact), and then a third the December of the following year (the 22nd, to be exact). (Thank God for obsessive record keeping.)

I don't know which two viewings she didn't remember. I'd be inclined to say she forgot the two home viewings, because people typically remember having seen something in the theater, but wouldn't it be weird to not remember that you'd watched a movie at least once sitting on a couch in your own living room?

But it doesn't matter, because indeed, she does love it now. I could tell from the ways she laughed over the antics of Pascal, the lovable chameleon shown above, that this was a new level of Tangled commitment than I'd seen from her before. In fact, when my son's interest seemed to be flagging late in the second act, she told him he could go do something else if he didn't want to watch the movie. Not that we could turn off the movie, a movie that had primarily been chosen as a family option to kill the time that his younger brother was taking his nap. But rather that he could bugger off and let Mummy and Daddy finish it if he weren't going to stop squirming.

I asked her point blank later on if she were no longer troubled by the decisions made by the characters at the end, which gender got to be self-sufficient and all that. Having been bothered by this previously was also something she appears to have forgotten.

Me? For the fifth damn time I got choked up in the places in Tangled that usually choke me up. The fifth damn time. The parts that weren't choking me up were giving me goosebumps. Probably also for the fifth time.

Nice to know I'm not going to fall out of love with it anytime soon.

A Murrier Christmas

Thanks to Netflix, many people had A Very Murray Christmas this year.

But ours was even Murrier.

Taking the risk of its potential inferior quality in our hands, we saved the Netflix original holiday special A Very Murray Christmas for Christmas Eve. The next night, violating my own personal rule of no longer watching Christmas movies at any point after December 24th, we watched the Bill Murray vehicle Scrooged, which my wife had never seen and which I hadn't seen since it came out in 1988. (Twenty-seven years ago. Jesus.)

So our Christmas was definitely chock full of Murray. But was that a good thing?

Let's called it a mixed bag. The Murray jury is still out.

Mixed not because one was good and one was bad, but mixed because both were kind of bad ... but also kind of good.

Actually, only one moment from A Very Murray Christmas really stood out as being genuinely funny, and not half-funny and half-cringeworthy. That moment came when (spoiler alert) George Clooney, scheduled to appear as part of Murray's holiday variety show that gets ruined by a blizzard that shuts down New York City, does actually appear in a dream sequence. He provides an expected dose of glitz and glamour as he dances with Miley Cyrus, but he also does something very unexpected. In the next song, kind of a jazzy, R&B-inspired number where Murray is the lead vocalist, Clooney pops out from behind a Christmas tree and sings: "Santa Claus wants some lovin'. Santa Claus wants some lovin' - yow."

My wife and I might have been forcing tepid laughs earlier to try to get ourselves in the swing of this special, but we both erupted here. There was just something so absurd about a) the voice in which Clooney delivers this line, and b) the way he leans stiffly out from behind the tree, then back behind it once his lines are finished. The tuxedo makes it all the more wonderfully goofy. We loved this moment so much that it has already become a meme in our family in just over 24 hours since we watched it. It made the whole disappointing affair worthwhile.

Scrooged actually has more in common with A Very Murray Christmas than just being holiday-themed. In this movie Murray is also involved in the preparations for a live holiday special, though this is a version of Dickens' A Christmas Carol titled Scrooge that the IBC network advertises with a fire and brimstone campaign of Murray's character's choosing. The network president has to search his soul to go on the same path to redemption as Dickens' most famous character.

Scrooged dates really easily -- there was one joke about throwing ice water on somebody because they thought he was Richard Pryor. That apparently relates to a long-forgotten episode in which Pryor set himself on fire in 1980, which even then was eight years before the movie came out. I'd say that's probably typical of what passes for humor in this movie, though it does also get a lot broader than that. But I was surprised that the moments with heart still worked on me -- sort of.

I was interested to note something else the two pieces have in common -- they both feature a guy I had completely forgotten about until I saw him last night. One of the "special guests" for Murray's new Christmas special was David Johansen -- so not all that special, since I'd forgotten entirely about his existence until I recognized his name in the credits. Looking him up, I determined he was the singer who once went by the name Buster Poindexter, and a person I hadn't thought of in 15 years suddenly popped back into my consciousness. Lo and behold, Johansen also played the ghost of Christmas past in Scrooged -- you know, the one that drives the taxi cab -- hence probably explaining his presence in A Very Murray Christmas. (FOM -- Friend of Murray.)

If Christmas is not yet past for you, have a merry one.

Or I guess a Murray one, if you are prepared for some lumps of coal mixed in with your gifts.

The gateway drug to grown-up movies

Twenty fifteen has been a year of transition -- or at least, hoped-for transition -- for my five-year-old son, when it comes to the movies.

As he's gingerly taken the first few steps into live action, he's also recoiled in horror. Pan was obviously a mistake, but even the dog and penguin movie Oddball presented difficulties for him -- first in terms of boredom, then actual fear. Meanwhile, Inside Out and Hotel Transylvania 2 continued to prove his love for movies ... the right movies, that is. Taken in total, the year provided ample evidence that he wasn't ready for Star Wars: The Force Awakens -- superfluous evidence, as we had pretty much ruled it out even before any of the live-action mishaps of September.

Those were all theatrical screenings. Maybe we needed to try something at home instead. And maybe it needed to be a Christmas movie about a hilarious, oversized elf.

I got the inspiration to try Jon Favreau's Elf, which I consider to be in the holy triumvirate of Christmas movies (along with A Christmas Story and It's a Wonderful Life), maybe a month ago, though it could have been as long as a year ago. In fact, I remember people talking on Facebook last Christmas about showing Elf to their kids, and even asking them if age four was too young for it. At the time they told me probably not. I couldn't remember myself, because even though it's in my top 100 films of all time and I own it, it has shockingly been more than a decade since I've seen it. (I've probably seen parts since then, but not the whole thing.)

About a month ago I convinced my wife that "our son" (to use the phrase overused by Han and Leia) was ready for Elf, and that December 23rd would be the perfect time to do it. It'd be exciting for him because he could stay up past his bedtime to watch it out on the couch with Mummy and Daddy, he could eat that candy cane he'd been asking about all week, and if he didn't like it, all he had to do was go to bed. There would be no leaving the theater, no crying, no wasted money. Plus, staying up later on the 23rd would probably make him fall asleep earlier on the 24th, or so the thinking went. (We'll find out tonight for sure.)

Well, I'm pleased to say it was a total hit. Helped along by his father's encouraging laughter -- genuine laughter, but probably a tad more than I would have otherwise provided -- he instantly got how funny and endearing Will Ferrell was as the title character. And the rest pretty much went smoothly, with only a few hiccups that I'll get to in a minute.

Simply put, I was astonished by how well this movie is constructed to cater to the interests and attention spans of children. Even live-action movies that are more directly aimed at children -- such as Stuart Little and The Smurfs 2, which we've tried and sort of half-finished at home -- have a lot more dead spots, where a child's attention might wander. Not Elf. It is action-packed from the start, and never releases you from the grasp of its charm.

I did worry at the very start. The movie begins with the soft, folksy, almost intentionally boring rhythms of a Bob Newhart narration, and for a moment I thought a) the whole narrative structure they were going for might be over my son's head, and b) Newhart himself might turn him off. But he made it through that, which really is only about a minute of screen time before the action proper begins.

It certainly helps lay the groundwork that the entire first 20 minutes (or so) take place at the North Pole. This goes a long way toward telling a child "this movie is for you, and it exists in a world you love and are familiar with." So even when the action shifts (permanently, my son was sort of disappointed to eventually learn) to New York City, the memory of this being a North Pole adventure is still intact. Certain movies would have hurried to get us to New York, but Elf knows that showing us the world Buddy knows is key to us appreciating the world Buddy doesn't know, and seeing that world through his eyes.

Then of course there are the great touches of Buddy talking to the Rankin-Bass characters, the woodland creatures and the debonair snowman. My son hasn't seen Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer -- the next oversight I must work to correct -- but he obviously knew that kind of thing was aimed at someone his age. When the narwhal surfaces to wish goodbye to Buddy, I leaped at the opportunity, knowing that there's a narwhal in one of my son's favorite shows, Octonauts. He didn't instantly remember the name of that mammal, but a smile crept across his face when I reminded him of it.

He laughed at Buddy's long walk south -- "That's a long way to walk!" -- and joined us in the laughter over Buddy obliviously getting hit by a taxi, trying the revolving doors for the first time and taking his first steps onto an escalator, which turn into that long lunge forward that makes the best use of Ferrell's elongated body. I couldn't help but think of my son in that scene, both literally, when he tried his first escalator (something my two-year-old is currently grappling with), and figuratively, as the whole movie of Elf was kind of like a metaphorical escalator for him.

No, I'm not entirely sure all the laughter he produced was involuntary, or if some of it was social laughter to show us that he got the same jokes we did. But it kept him engaged, and that was the important part.

I had a worry early on when there was talk of whether Santa was real or not. Even the possibility that Santa was not real was not something I wanted him to think about. Fortunately, this movie's position is that Santa is absolutely, 100% real, so the lack of belief in him is a characteristic ascribed only to those on the naughty list. There's also that part where Artie Lange plays the department store Santa, and his beard is pulled off, revealing an imposter. My son did have a few comments about that, but they did not lead to the conclusion that all the Santas he's seen in various shopping malls have been imposters. (Not one that he voiced, anyway.)

He did get bored at exactly one point, and it's funny how easy it would have been to predict. It's that scene when James Caan's boss, played by Michael Lerner, visits him in his office and makes threats about the security of his job if he doesn't meet a certain deadline. A totally necessary scene for advancing the plot that probably lasts about 90 seconds. Yet this was enough time for my son to ask how much time was remaining in the movie, and my wife to get irritated and tell him that if he wasn't enjoying it he could just go to sleep. This was the only time that I feared we wouldn't complete Elf, and the fear proved short-lived as Buddy returned front and center in the next scene.

This is an astonishingly tight script. At about the 50-minute mark, my wife told my son that there was an hour left, and I worried that if that were really true, we certainly might lose him. But not long after that the movie starts moving in high gear toward its conclusion and wraps up in a neat and tidy 90 minutes, bringing a tear to my eye in several spots, as it always does. The fact that there is zero fat in this script makes it even funnier that my son's primary complaint about the movie was that it was "a bit long."

And being up until 9:15 meant that there were no bedtime shenanigans. No sooner had the movie ended than he disappeared to the bedroom and was not heard from again. Leaving his parents free to provide ample evidence of there being no Santa, by building the "pirate fortress" that Santa is going to bring him later on tonight.

So my hope is that Elf is what was needed to get my son over the hump, to make the next movie with no animated characters just that much easier for him to swallow. With a distant eye on the long-term goal -- being absolutely sure he's ready to go to the movies with me for Star Wars: Episode VIII in May of 2017.

Compulsory captioning

I just watched (deep breath) A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence on Netflix, and for the first time I can remember, was not allowed to turn off the closed captioning.

If I wanted English subtitles for the Swedish dialogue at all -- though one might debate the need to understand any of the dialogue in a movie like this -- I also had to have those descriptions of the sounds on the soundtrack, almost like audio stage directions, along with them.

At first I thought this would bother me to no end. Especially with a movie that relies on its absurd and beautiful visuals as much as Roy Andersson's does, the last thing I needed was extraneous white text on the screen, telling me when there are the sounds of bicycle spokes spinning or birds chirping.

Then I came around on them.

I decided that especially in a movie comprised of absurd and poignant vignettes, which satirize the very idea of narrative filmmaking while also getting at something deeper and more profound, having audio stage directions kind of contributed to the whole mood.

If a king on horseback from four or five centuries earlier suddenly stops in a modern-day cafe while the rest of his soldiers march by outside to battle, there is something kind of wonderful about the movie telling you that the sound of horse hooves can be heard. It's essentially a diagram of the humor, the kind of thing you might provide for someone as a proof of concept.

And I suppose it did contribute to my own reflection on existence as well.

I've now seen two of the three films in Andersson's absurdist trilogy, having seen Songs from the Second Floor way back in 2001 when I was crossing the country to move to Los Angeles (seems like a lifetime ago). You the Living still eludes me. But I've decided these are definitely my kind of movies. They don't make a lick of narrative sense, and that's often a problem for me, but not when it isn't. I guess that's just more proof that each film must be taken on its own terms, and two similar films can strike us very differently depending on things like tone, shot composition and performance.

All of those are perfect in A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, and the closed captioning gave me an interesting insight into how somebody thought this movie's subtle rhythms should be interpreted to someone who can't hear.

It's a movie for all your senses, really.

My Force Awakens thoughts - in my own voice

You need to read everything related to Star Wars: The Force Awakens with a spoiler awareness anyway, but I'll make it official: SPOILER WARNING. Anything and everything about the movie will be spoiled in this post.

There are such a mind-boggling number of things a person could discuss related to Star Wars: The Force Awakens that it leaves me daunted to even consider doing it here. However, leaving none of my thoughts on the movie on my blog also didn't sit well with me, and seems irresponsible to you, my loyal readers. (One of whom actually asked me if I'd be writing something about it.)

Fortunately, I've got a good compromise.

I recorded a podcast on Saturday night, the latest ReelGood podcast, all about it. We had been off since August until two weeks ago, in part because one of the guys was out of the country for two months, and then due to some scheduling conflicts once he returned. But we're back in full force, pun totally not intended. Two weeks ago we started up again with In the Heart of the Sea, and this time, we sunk our teeth into the seventh Star Wars movie, perhaps unsurprisingly at twice our normal length.

You can listen to it here.

However, on the off chance you don't want to or don't have time to listen to an hour-long podcast in the heart of Christmas season, I'll included a few little "featurettes" below on the movie. They don't come close to addressing my full thoughts, but they do give you two stand-alone blog post ideas that seeing the movie inspired me to think of.

My private pain

Given that I saw this movie at least 36 hours before most people I know, you can imagine how difficult it was to live with the knowledge that was burdening me: that the lovable rogue known as Han Solo, one of the most iconic characters in film history, is no more.

I wanted to tell someone. I had to tell someone. But I told no one. I lived with this pain privately.

And indeed it was pain. The death of Han Solo really ruined the end of the movie for me, not to mention parts of the next few days. Which is no comment on the way the movie ends, or the events of those days in my life. It's just a comment on how difficult it was to feel optimistic about anything when one of cinema's great characters has just gotten impaled by a lightsaber and fallen down one of Star Wars' trademark bottomless pits. At the hands of his own son, no less.

The first thing I could compare it to (SPOILER COMING ABOUT A REALLY OLD STAR TREK MOVIE) was the death of James T. Kirk. Kirk of course dies in Star Trek Generations, a movie that, my God, is now 21 years old. And though that was tragic, at least Kirk died saving the universe, pretty much literally. He fell heroically to his death, but not his instant death, allowing him a few dying words before the lights go out. Sad but satisfying.

Han Solo? He gets a touching final gesture, the soft caress of his son's cheek, but other than that, his death is pretty much immediate. It was heroic in its own right, I suppose, as it involved trying to save the soul of his son. I guess not everyone can die saving the universe.

It felt so funny walking around with this knowledge imprisoned in my breast, knowledge I couldn't share with almost anybody. It wasn't that I wanted to spoil the movie for other people, only that I wanted to seek some kind of personal counseling while talking it over with them. Being killed by your own son is crazy hardcore, even if that was a possibility that was underlying both The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. If these new movies are going to be about the redemption of Kylo Ren -- and Adam Driver's conflicted performance certainly suggests they will be -- then having killed your father makes that a lot harder. To quote Seinfeld, that's a pretty big matzah ball.

I couldn't keep it in, but somehow I did. But now you all know, and that does make it a little bit better. We'll get through this ... together.

Stormtroopers are people too

My favorite new character was Finn, played by John Boyega. Having not been a huge fan of Attack the Block, I was surprised by just how much I liked him here. He was everything I wanted from a Star Wars character.

Though it did make me ponder the nature of the stormtrooper.

I think we don't yet know everything we are eventually going to know about the back story of this reformed stormtrooper, which might explain why he's actually pretty good with a lightsaber and why he has the heightened sense of empathy that seems to be entirely lacking from other stormtroopers. But if we are to take it on face value, that he is "just" a stromtrooper, it does make us reconsider everything we think we know about stormtroopers.

Even though stormtroopers are not actual clones, we've kind of always thought of them that way, haven't we? Even when we've heard their voices and they do sound like "regular guys," we haven't seen a single stormtrooper with his helmet off -- the only unhelmeted stormtroopers we've ever seen were Han and Luke posing as stormtroopers. They must have thought, wisely, that it would be too humanizing of these villainous pawns, many of whom are killed or otherwise disposed of in thoughtless fashion, if we saw what they really looked like. Saw just how much they are "regular guys."

But they certainly have a clone mentality. They do what they're told and they don't ask questions. They never doubt the morality of their orders and they never hesitate when asked to carry them out. In short, they are deserving of no mercy.

Until Finn, that is.

Finn -- whose "name" is some alphanumeric code beginning with FN -- first has an awakening about the evil nature of The First Order when he mourns the death of a fellow stormtrooper. Yeah, he's horrified about the killing of civilians on Jakku, but his actual moment of crisis relates to the death of a fellow stormtrooper on the battlfield. In that moment, and for the rest of the film, the guy is overloaded with empathy. And eventually, he also has a surplus of bravery and moral fortitude.

What I want to know is: Is any stormtrooper capable of this? Could any of these "drones" break rank and decide to rebel against the nefarious ways of their masters? And if so, why doesn't it happen more often? WHAT HAPPENED WITH FINN ON JAKKU?

The Star Wars movies have never shied away from coincidence in the telling of their stories, so I won't be all that surprised when it turns out that Finn is a "special" stormtrooper. Though so far, the idea that he might be Lando Calrissian's son seems a little far-fetched, and also possibly racist -- the only two black guys in the Star Wars universe don't need to be related to each other.

But wait ... there is another black guy in the Star Wars universe. Could he be ... Mace Windu's son? Or grandson? Or great great grandson?

Episode VIII comes out in May of 2017.

As for this one ... I'm seeing it again on Wednesday. That's as good a single-sentence summation of my thoughts on The Force Awakens as you're likely to get.